Kick off your Success…

“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
– Henry Ford

This is a famous common sense statement from Henry Ford, and it’s so true: How we think always affects what we do, and how well we do it.

From what I didn’t learn about selling at my first dealership, I not only sold 10 or less my first 5 years, I was convinced it was ‘impossible to sell more cars, because …’

I started selling cars with enthusiasm but no education in how to sell, so my continued failure + the ‘failure support’ I got from people in the huddle convinced me that it wasn’t my fault.

I even went to work at a Toyota store, (still sold 8) and worked with a guy my age, my experience level who sold 15 a month like clockwork and didn’t put in 12 hour days like I did.

While I watched him do what I said couldn’t be done, I still argued against doing what he did, and I kept repeating, “It won’t work.” Duh!

So I spent 5 years putting in twice the hours to sell 8 than it took for me to sell 30+ once I learned to sell.

“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” – Michael Jordan

We used to laugh and say we were just selling cars until we got a real job. We didn’t realize we were standing on a gold mine and all we had to do was DIG to hit the mother lode.

We thought we were just standing on ‘blacktop’ waiting for an ‘up’ and hoping it would be ‘the one’.

Years later I read Zig Ziglar’s, “See You At The Top”. I really listened to what he said because he was #1 of 3,000 salespeople in his company, and he was #2 in a group of 7,000 salespeople at a different company.

You can’t get lucky enough to pull that off – it takes skills.

Ziglar kicked off my success because he convinced me that I could get to the top, too, as long as I understood what Michael Jordan also said; I had to personally make it happen.

In the next couple of years, I went through 100 books and tapes on selling, and spent all of my extra time developing my new skills. It took a while, because I had opened a business and had a full time job.

What took even longer was to learn how to convert the sales skills and processes those super stars in sales were teaching me about selling real estate, insurance or other products into the skills and processes I needed to sell cars.

“The journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step.”
– China, around 400 B.C.

This last tip is really old, and it’s still where almost everyone with good intentions gets stuck.

Ziglar put his spin on this, too, and reminds us that we never wait until all the lights are green to start our trip.

The biggest mistake people make is that they put off important things to make way for the easy stuff.

Most people keep waiting for the ‘perfect time’ to improve, so they never start and then fail by default.

Figure out what you want, believe you can do it, don’t wait for someone else to push you to improve, and start today, not tomorrow.

You’ll be glad you did!

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Sell more cars with Joe Verde’s sales book, “Earn Over $100,000 Selling Cars – Every Year” for a free PDF or to order a free soft cover book.